FRAGMENT TWO: THE SOCIOLOGICAL PROJECT
Like other intellectual disciplines, sociology has over time developed a body of theories, concepts and programmes of research that can seem overly technical to others. And to complicate matters further, while we all accept that, say, physicists or biologists, possess expert knowledge that we do not, there is a widespread reluctance to accord the same respect and latitude to sociologists. After all, we all have views about what is happening around us, and why. And this is how it should be. But in this second fragment I want to make a case that sociology has a bank of resources that make a vital contribution to understanding and accounting for our fractured society in what is an increasingly fractured world.
I’m going to start by noting five different levels of analysis that might be characterised as building blocks in considerations of the nature of the fractured society: organisations, institutions, cultures, social structures and agency. We are perhaps most familiar with social organisations like schools, colleges, churches and mosques, and with political organisations like interest or campaign groups, think tanks and political parties. All of these might be said to consist of structured patterns of relationships involving people occupying certain positions, together with expectations about how they should behave in those positions. In sociological parlance, positions are known as statuses and the behavioural expectations associated with them as roles. Institutionsprovide the environment in which organisations are embedded and operate. They can empower or constrain organisations. They can be said to consist in sets of social or cultural rules that exert an influence across a range of organisations. As these rules – what sociologists call norms – evolve and shift, so organisations like schools, further education colleges and universities must adapt.
The idea of culture here has a broader application. Just as organisations are embedded in institutions, so institutions are influenced by and responsive to wider community, regional, national and even global cultures. Cultures embrace systems of beliefs, attitudes and values ranging from scientific theories to novels and poems. But while cultures can and often do exert an influence on institutions and organisations, they can also be influenced in turn by social structures. All societies in the history of our species have been structured, though in the earliest hunter-gatherer communities this was only minimally so. In traditional as well as modern societies, social structures or relations are profoundly influential. They shape cultures and all that cultures in turn shape, although it is important to note that they do not determine them. The kind of structures I have in mind here are among the most often cited by sociologists, namely, social class, gender and race.
We finally come to agency. My contention is that we have a degree of free will, although it is more restricted than we tend to think. For most of our lives we tend to run like trams along pre-set tracks. It is easiest for those whose interests coincide favourably with their organisational, institutional, cultural and structural circumstances to appreciate what they are likely to see as their freedom to act. For others less positively placed in society the idea and experience of agency can seem far more remote. Harassed single parents struggling to pay their rent and heating and food bills can feel dispossessed of any sense of agency as all roads ahead seem blocked and impenetrable. Free will, I insist, exists but it is invariably filtered through our positioning in society.
I’m not claiming that this quartet of building blocks is the only way to construct an explanatory account of the fractured society, although they strike me as solid candidates to do the job. Nor do I want to minimise the interaction between them. It will be a predominant theme in this pamphlet that social structures impact on cultures which impact on institutions which impact on organisations which impact on agency. But if this is the most compelling ‘direction of travel’, this is not to rule out the possibility of reverse causation, or the possibility that the exercise of collective agency, or solidarity, in a single organisation might ripple out and occasion wider institutional, cultural or structural waves. Notwithstanding their rarity, campaigns or resistance originating in a single organisation can gain sufficient traction with the public as to challenge longstanding and apparently stable societal relations. But, to repeat, this kind of reverse causation is quite rare.
An example of a causal thread emanating from structures via cultures, institutions and organisations and ultimately impacting on agency might help at this point. Consider current decision-making in a typical English general practice. The evidence is clear. GPs are rationing face-to-face appointments with their patients and virtual consultations have become the norm, the default option, in many practices. Surgery waiting rooms are empty while GPs sit in their offices or at home making telephone calls. On the face of it GPs are exercising agency, albeit in ways many patients disapprove of. But it’s more complex than it appears. GP practices, as organisations, are exercising telling constraints on what GPs decide and do. Funding for general practice has been cut by 20 per cent in real terms, making it difficult for practices to add to the number of fully qualified GPs, and this despite each doctor being responsible for an increasing number of patients. At the same time the salaries of Physician Associates or Assistants (PAs) and the likes of practice pharmacists are fully covered by a body called Agenda for Change. The net result is more diverse, or diluted, general practice teams comprising an increasing proportion of non-GPs. Patients throughout the NHS in England are finding it difficult to book a face-to-face appointment with a ‘real doctor’; and disconcertingly often they think they are seeing a doctor when they are in fact seeing a PA (typically a science graduate with a two-year add-on qualification and, controversially, without a designated regulatory body).
The point to be emphasised here is that GPs’ decisions are circumscribed by factors beyond their immediate control. Moreover, their practices, considered as organisations, are part and parcel of larger and imposing institutional pressures. The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan makes it unambiguously clear that new ‘professionals’ like PAs are very much part of the future of the NHS (and in hospital or secondary as well as primary care). Individual general practices are between a rock and a hard place, locked in, unable to buck a nationwide institutional trend. It is a trend ‘calculated’ to appear ‘rational’ within our contemporary culture. Remember what I said about cultural relativity earlier: any story or narrative about what matters, is appropriate, is right, can now compete openly and publicly for followers. The NHS, the dominant and prevailing narrative informs us, is ailing and in need of rescue. People are unhappy and angry. Their relatives have died for want of prompt treatment and care. Just look at the way the NHS failing us: you can’t get to see your GP, hospital waiting lists are soaring, and so on! We need a comprehensive rethink on how we deliver health care.
Now let’s turn to structure. The party-political evidence is clear. Prior to the election of Thatcher in 1979 it was accepted that the NHS was one of, if not the, premier health care system in the western hemisphere. But Thatcher was into markets and determined to rid of us of what she saw as the most compelling ‘socialist’ institution in British life. She was constrained politically through the 1980s but did some preparatory work which was only partially addressed during the Blair/Brown New Labour years (1997-2010). In demonstrating a strong will and an irresistible determination to get her own way, it would be easy to attribute too much causal power to the forthright agency Thatcher undoubtedly exercised. But sociology exhorts the recognition and study of unseen social structures operating beneath-the-surface to either constrain or enable people’s decision-making on the surface. Culture too can intrude. Thatcher’s agency, in short, was fuelled and boosted by the social structural shift towards rentier capitalism from the mid-1970s. And it was further facilitated by what I earlier termed cultural relativity, which came to the aid of her mantra that ‘There Is No Alternative’ (TINA) by helping to undermine any and all opposing narratives and challenges to it. In this way Thatcher’s TINA, in the guise of ‘Thatcherism’, was insinuated into UK culture in the form of a taken-for-granted narrative at the end of narratives. This narrative was neoliberalism. And neoliberalism is properly seen and analysed sociologically as an ideology.
The term ideology is now commonly used to refer to any way of seeing and interpreting things (cultural relativity strikes again). This is far from its sense in classical sociology, where it was used to denote a partial and distorted way of seeing and interpreting the world that reflect the interests of a particular social group. Neoliberal ideology is the dominant ideology in post-1970s UK. It is a mix of philosophy, theory and practice. It paints human beings as essentially egocentric, self-serving and competitive, casts citizens as consumers, and sees the social world we inhabit as one in which we are necessarily pitted against each other. It is a scenario in which the smartest, toughest and fittest rise inexorably to occupy elite positions. Thatcher’s TINA would have us believe that this mode of occupancy of society’s highest echelons of decision-making is in the best interests of the population as a whole. This is the core message of ‘trickle down economics’. Neoliberalism is what the capital monopolists and their allies want us to sign up to.
It is part of the task of the sociologist to expose ideologies for what they are, namely, distorted representations of ourselves and our society that best suit the vested interests of a minority. It is in fact easier to expose the flaws in neoliberal thinking than it is to persuade many in the population to reject it. This is because the mass media rubber stamp or fail to contest much neoliberal rhetoric. Why do they do this? Well, 90 per cent of the UK-wide print media is controlled by just three companies (Reach plc (formerly Trinity Mirror), News UK, and DMG Media). US-Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, which publishes The Sun, The Times and their Sunday titles, all right-wing outlets, controls one-third of the UK’s newspaper market. The BBC, which has from its inception had a pro-establishment ethos, has been shown to be increasingly receptive to neoliberal ideology. It is a process cemented by the appointment of what Thatcher once called ‘our people’ into strategic editorial roles. The BBC is the only online news provider in the UK that is more widely used as a source of online news than search engines and social media. New bias can take different forms. For example, ‘content bias’ occurs when the news presents only one side of a dispute or conflict; ‘corporate bias’ happens when stories are selected or slanted to satisfy owners of corporate media, like Murdoch; and ‘coverage bias’ is when media choose to report only negative news about one party or platform. An object lesson in mainstream content, corporate and coverage bias was the way multiple outlets operated in unison to smear and undermine left-wing Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party and potential Prime Minister. Another is the pro-Israeli bias in reports of the ‘conflict’ in Gaza, notwithstanding the notification of ongoing Israeli war crimes against the Palestinians by the International Court of Justice.
To those who dislike the idea of ideology promoted here, my riposte would be that its rejection is undoubtedly convenient for those who would have us see the world through the distorted lens of their material interests. Are we really to trust news filtered through the interventionist proprietorship of Murdoch? The same point can be made against those who object to the notion of false consciousness. It is, or should be, readily apparent that citizens can be systematically tricked into worldviews inimical to their own interests. But it is one thing for sociologists to debunk ideologies and to expose media bias and quite another to make these charges stick further afield. Mostly sociologists talk and write to and for each other. Calls for a ‘public sociology’ committed to informing and educating the public are more ritualistic than realistic in the current structural and cultural climate.
I want to plant the notion here that the sociological project is necessarily, that is, both logically and morally, oriented to ‘informing and educating the public’. And, critically, that this extends to actively opposing any forces that stand in the way of realising this project. It is our duty to debunk pernicious ideologies and to expose ideologists for what they are. But a proper defence of this contention must wait awhile. There is a lot more ground to cover first.